The Importance of a Sitemap for your Website

The Importance of a Sitemap for your Website

So, you’ve had a great looking website designed, and hopefully your web developer has search engine optimised the website for the best possible results on the search engines. After all, what is the point in spending a pile of dollars on a nice looking site if no one can find it, right?

But sadly, while many websites have a lot of effort put into the look and functionality of the website, many website developers fail to finish it off with the essentials that play the most important role in ensuring you can be found easily on the search engines, and one of the most important (and often overlooking) is the HTML and XML Sitemaps.

There are a few types of sitemap:

HTML Sitemaps – This is usually just a link on the footer of every webpage that will point you to a page with all pages of the website listed, with links to these pages. The advantage of this is for people to find your pages easily, which is important especially in larger websites. It also plays a key role in helping search engines to trawl through your website quicker.

XML Sitemaps – The XML Sitemap cannot be seen through the main website through a browser, however hopefully your web developer or webmaster has created and uploaded this for your website as it is even more relevant than the standard HTML sitemap. The XML sitemap can be easily generated using specific software designed for this purpose.
Once the XML sitemap is created it should be uploaded to Google through their Google Webmaster Tools, which you will need to create an account for. You should also do the same for Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Siteexplorer for the best results on all the major search engines.

If you are making frequent changes to your website, or run an online shopping cart or directory, then it is important to ensure the sitemap is recreated every time these changes take place, and then your XML sitemap is resubmitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo to ensure your new pages or changes are updated.

At Devision Design, large websites have a special automatic Sitemap Generator added which allows the site owner or the team at Devision to simply push a button and the new HTML, XML and ROR Sitemaps be recreated and submitted to all the mentioned search engine Webmaster accounts, not only saving you a heap of time-consuming work, but also generating an immediate response from the search engines, so you can often see the new pages appear in the search engines in a matter of minutes.

So, if you are unsure about if your website had an XML Sitemap or an XML Sitemap generator, then I advise you to ask your web developer as you could be missing a lot of valuable visitors to your website through a poor search engine listing.

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design & Web SEO Coach
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Author : Chris Bourke